Throwing a bone to fans of Louis Bellson’s Modern Reading Text in 4/4 here, with an easy paradiddle system. Most of these things happen naturally out of my teaching, or my playing; here I just […]
Category: snare drum
Eight stroke rolls?
Reading George Lawrence Stone’s Technique of Percussion, in a 1953 International Musician column he discusses “compound” rolls— rolls including two accented singles. The six stroke roll is most familiar of that type, the 10 stroke […]
Pataflafla builder
Exceptionally granular page of exercises developing the pataflafla, a drag variant, and Steve Gadd’s pataflafla-ed 6 stroke roll— you can hear that in his solo on the Tom Scott record here. Usually I would walk […]
Rudimental Reed: two methods
A whole lot of snare drum happening right now. Here are two pretty basic things to do with Syncopation on the practice pad, first with short rolls on the short notes and paradiddles on the […]
Paradiddlea
One of my stupidly-named rudiment variations from 2011 here, without the original superfluous hyphen. In this spelling it might entice some people to say para-DID-lee-ah, of which I approve. It’s a five note paradiddle, RLRRL. […]
Paradiddle-diddle phrases – 01
A page of paradiddle-diddle phrases, like some six stroke roll pages from last year. A couple of my students are eating these up. This is how you learn these things, you don’t just go down […]
More short rolls and drags
Following up the page from the other day, here are some more short open roll and drag combinations. I’ve also rewritten the other page in normal notation— download that and compare it with the first […]
Beginning open drags and rolls
UPDATE: I’ve rewritten this page in standard roll/drag notation— in 16th notes in 2/4. You can use the page here as a key if there’s any question of how to interpret it. Basic page of […]
Stone supplement – flam beats
Adding some things I want to the flam pages from Stick Control, 90 years after the fact: Like an obedient little fool I once tried counting 20 repetitions while working from Stone— while standing at […]
Shifting triplacues? Something?
I don’t know what we call this, “triplacues”? Quasi-irregularly spaced (in this case) flammed triplets, with a accent after the flam, flamacue style? …look, if there was ever any qualm about giving something drumming related […]
Ultimate double paradiddle builder – 01
Happy 2026 everyone— continuing this “ultimate builder” series, with double paradiddles. It looks like a lot of stuff, but these are all things you have to have together to do the actual rudiment. You’ll learn […]
Left-leading density patterns – 01
Continuing this page of left handed rudimental/rudiment-like exercise patterns, getting into some very dense activity, forcing some speedy movement. See this post for the justification for getting into the odd tuplets at all— it’s not […]